Cooperative is monitoring Luna over the winter

Tribes, Canada and the U.S. are watching over the killer whale

Peggy Andersen, The Associated Press

Published 10:00 pm, Monday, December 15, 2003

Luna, the U.S.-born killer whale who's spent two years alone in Canada's Nootka Sound, is being monitored over the winter by fisheries agents with help from local Indians, police and residents, Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans said yesterday.

The U.S. and Canadian governments are cooperating in an effort to reunite the 4-year-old male orca next spring with its family, L-pod, which spends much of the year chasing salmon near the San Juan Islands.

In recent weeks, the fisheries department said in a news release, Luna has been wandering throughout the sound to forage for food -- moving away from the dock at Gold River where it had become somewhat of a tourist attraction last summer.

The U.S. and Canadian fisheries agencies worked together in summer 2002 to move another young orca -- a 2-year-old female called Springer -- back to Canadian waters from busy Puget Sound, where it had wandered after its mother died.

That effort was deemed a success when Springer returned to Canada's inland waters with her family last summer.

Luna's situation is a little different. It's older and its mother, still alive, has a new calf.

The region's killer whale pods -- known as the northern and southern resident populations -- are fish-eaters that spend months in the waters between Vancouver Island and the inland U.S. and Canadian coasts. It is not known where they spend winters, though they've been seen off California and Alaska.

The population of the U.S. group has dwindled from an estimated high of 125 animals to 84 today, including Luna, as it struggles with pollution, human encroachment and dwindling salmon runs.

NMFS declared the group a "depleted" population in 2002, which allows for more study.